The 1904 Anthropology Days and Olympic Games: Sport, Race, and American Imperialism

Introduction: Bodies before Boas, Sport before the Laughter Left

1 Introduction Bodies before Boas, Sport before the Laughter Left susan brownell This volume reunites two strands of history that are usually treated separately: the histories of anthropology and the Olympic Games.1 It does so by looking back to a time at the start of the twentieth century when the discipline of anthropology, the phenomenon of modern sport, and the performance genre of the modern Olympic Games were just starting to take a definite form. It was a time of “polymorphous performativity”2 when the distinctions between “education” and “entertainment” were not as institutionalized as they are now—when the lines between museums, zoos, circuses, historical reenactments , sports, Wild West shows, Olympic Games, and world’s fairs were not as clear as they are now. In the last decade or so, histories of the Olympic Games, world’s fairs, museums, zoos, and circuses have come to constitute minor historical genres. However, this is an artificial separation that it is now possible to make in hindsight, after a century in which the divisions between them became institutionalized and culturally crystallized. It is only possible to understand these histories by examining their earlier shared history, as well as the forces that ultimately drove them apart. And by understanding the forces that drove them apart, we will arrive at a greater understanding of our contemporary times and the great cultural performances that define them. Why do Olympic Games now attract much greater global attention than world’s fairs, when a century ago they were only a minor side event? What does this reversal tell us about the times in which we now live? brownell 2 John MacAloon argues, “The modern social sciences and the Olympic Games were born of the same historical era; it is hardly surprising that their root problematics are identical. . . . Olympic history illuminates the origins of modern social science.”3 The discipline of anthropology and the Olympic Games both emerged out of a mash of theories and performance genres that were fermenting at the fin de siècle. This mash had been first stirred together in the mid-nineteenth century by the forces of exploration, colonization , imperialism, industrialization, and capitalism. The feature shared by anthropology and the modern Olympics was that they were ways of making sense out of the cross-cultural encounters between human beings that began to take place on an unprecedented scale. In the encounter between the West and “the Rest,” sports were used as “intercultural spaces” or “contact zones.”4 The fascination with savages strengthened the identity of the West by defining “who we are not.” It proceeded in tandem with a fascination with ancient Greece and Rome that defined “who we are” by constructing a history of “Western civilization.” The modern Olympic Games emerged out of the neoclassical revival that began in the Renaissance and gained momentum from the French Revolution and the Greek war of independence; philhellenism provided the West with a shared ancestor, ancient Greece, which defined the West in opposition to its Others—the Orient and the exotic “savages.” One of the sources of the Olympic Movement5 was what John MacAloon has called “popular ethnography,” a “crosscultural voyeurism” that became accessible to the mass public for the first time in the late nineteenth century.6 At the same time that “scientific” ethnology was being organized by intellectual elites, “popular ethnography” was being elaborated by nonintellectual elites as well as entrepreneurs from all walks of life, including the “savages” themselves who took advantage of the popular interest in them for their own profit. Philhellenism and anthropology were complementary poles of the same phenomenon: both Western civilization and its opposites were reflected in the popular ethnography of the times—for example, circuses and world’s fairs typically included classical “living statues,” chariot races, Introduction 3 and gladiator combat as well as displays of exotic animals and humans from Asia, Africa, and North America. Toward an Interconnected History of Anthropology, Sport, and the Olympic Games Through examining the unique association of the Olympic Games with an event called “Anthropology Days” at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition (lpe) in St. Louis in 1904, it is possible to look back at a moment in time before specialized performance genres had emerged out of the hodgepodge of popular ethnography. The Olympic Games are described in detail in the chapters by Nancy Parezo and Mark Dyreson. In brief...